CHAPTER 1 – THE DROP
The world skips.
That's the only way my brain knows how to file it. One frame, I'm in a hallway that smells like boiled cabbage and bleach, a door half open, someone yelling down the stairs. Next frame, there's wet concrete smashing into my shoulder and the air's too cold to breathe.
I hit hard, roll, and end up flat on my back staring at a slice of sky framed by brick.
For a second I think I blacked out and fell down the stairs. Then my lungs actually drag in air and it's all wrong. The cold's got teeth. It bites through my clothes like they're not there, slides under the hoodie, cracks its way into my joints.
Too cold. Move.
My fingers don't want to listen. I flex them anyway, one hand at a time, checking bones and skin. Knuckles scraped, palm stinging, shoulder screaming where it took the fall. Nothing feels broken. That's something.
My backpack's still on me. Strap digging into my collarbone, the cheap plastic clasp pressing into my throat. Good. If I'd lost that, I'd—
Doesn't matter. It's here.
I force myself upright. The alley tilts sideways for a second, brick walls bending. I plant one hand on rough mortar and wait it out, breathing slow, counting heartbeats. The ringing in my ears eases enough to let in the rest of the noise.
Distant siren. A car horn, angry and short. A clank of metal somewhere two streets over. Air moving between buildings with a low, steady moan.
City, my brain supplies. But not mine.
The sky glow above the alley's mouth is the wrong color. Too yellow, too dirty, like someone dimmed the world and never turned it back up. The buildings are wrong too—close together, old brick and fire escapes stacked like someone played Tetris with housing codes and lost.
Where am I?
The last place I remember is three floors up in a different kind of rotten, plaster peeling, cheap vinyl underfoot. That hallway had pale green walls and the heat turned too high. This alley's all brick and damp and a wind sharp enough to cut.
I check my pockets on instinct. Wallet—empty of anything that matters. Crumpled bills, a few coins. No ID. No card. Didn't have much before the… jump, anyway. Phone's there, cold glass against my thigh.
I want to sit down and shiver and maybe throw up. That's a luxury. Cold's already chewing through thin fabric. Concrete under me is wet; I can feel it seeping into my jeans.
Move.
The alley runs maybe twenty meters to a street. One end's a dead wall with a rusted fire escape. The other opens to traffic and more light. A dumpster squats partway along the right-hand wall, steam breathing out of a vent above it. There's a camera bubble at the far corner, cheap dome set too high, red LED blinking.
So: one way out. One eye on the corner. Too many places for someone else to come from if they're already here.
"Hello?" I try, voice coming out smaller than I like.
It dies against brick. Nobody answers.
Good.
I push off the wall and make myself walk toward the street. Knees argue. I ignore them. As I get closer, the air picks up new smells: exhaust, old fryer oil, too many people using the same trash cans for too long.
The sidewalk beyond the alley mouth is cracked, patched, and cracked again. Snow's been shoveled into dirty piles along the curb, gray and brown and halfway to ice. Breath fogs in front of my face as soon as I step out from between the walls.
First thing I see is a metal trash can on the corner with a sticker on it. City logo. Some stylized tower shape and a banner under it.
GOTHAM CITY SANITATION.
My stomach drops so fast it's like the world skips again.
No.
I stare at the words longer than I should, like they're going to rearrange into something sane. Some other Gotham. A neighborhood name, a brand, a joke. Anything.
Gotham's not real, the part of my brain that grew up with old comics says. It's panels and ink and movie shots and fan forums. It's something you read about under a blanket when the yelling gets too loud in the next room. It's not on street furniture.
The wind shoves a knife of cold down my collar. My eyes water. That helps; I can blame the sting on the air, not on the way my chest tightens.
Fine. Sure. Somebody named their city department after a comic book town. People do dumb branding things all the time. Doesn't have to mean anything.
I look past the trash can. Across the street, a bus shelter squats under a flickering ad. On the glass, behind scratches and a tear in the poster, there's a transit map. Big block letters across the top:
GOTHAM CITY TRANSIT AUTHORITY.
Yeah. That's… not great.
I pull my phone out with stiff fingers. The screen fights me, glove friction and the cold making it slow to wake up. Battery's at thirty-two percent. Time's off by a couple of minutes from what I remember, but not enough to mean anything.
Maps app opens to a world I don't recognize.
It's not just that the little blue dot isn't where I left it. The whole map's wrong. The state lines, the coastline, the city names. Some match, enough to hurt. Others don't. There's no [home city] where it should be. Zoom in. Zoom out. The text "Gotham City" sits near a dark river like it's been there forever.
I swallow. The sound's too loud in my own ears.
Hallucination. Stroke. Coma. Something.
Doesn't change the temperature.
A bus roars past, close enough that the wind of it slaps my hoodie flat against my chest. The side panel flashes a route number and destination in amber LEDs. The last word on the scroll is GOTHAM. Like it's been that way all my life.
My fingers are going numb. The world can be broken, but my body's still going to freeze at the same speed.
Deal with not dying first. Freak out later.
I shove the phone back in my pocket, tuck my hands under my arms, and step back into the alley's shadow. The camera's red LED ticks from one side to the other, cheap little motor humming. I angle my hood so the brim catches most of its line.
Don't stand in the open. Don't be a face anyone can rewind.
The alley feels narrower on the way back in. Walls loom, mortar lines dark with old damp. There's a crust of salt underfoot from the last ice, mixed with something slicker I don't want to think about. The dumpster halfway down is overflowing—collapsed bags, broken pallets, cardboard sogged dark.
The heat rolling off the vent above it hits my face like a weak breath. Worse smell here: rot, stale grease, sour milk. But the air's a couple degrees warmer.
I stand there for a second, letting the warmth creep over my skin. Fingers itch to start rearranging things. There's a recess in the wall just past the dumpster—a doorway that's been sealed off with warped plywood and rusted hardware. The threshold's sunk half a step down, like the building's been settling for decades. The overhang sticks out just enough to catch some of the falling sleet.
Shelter. Sort of.
The plywood doesn't sit flush. Bottom edge is bowed, leaving a gap where wind knifes through. But the recess is deep—enough to sit. Enough to tuck in. The dumpster blocks most of the view from the street side. With a little work, it could block more.
I check the corners first. No bedroll. No bottles. No needles. No obvious signs someone's claimed this spot recently.
Doesn't mean no one will come back. Just means they're not here now.
A loose brick lies on the cracked concrete near the sunk threshold, half dusted with dirty snow. I nudge it with my shoe. It rocks in place, heavy and satisfying.
Brick. Dumpster. Doorway.
Parts.
If I were back home, I'd be thinking about load-bearing, airflow, mold. Here, I think about wind vectors and lines of sight.
The gap under the plywood is the main problem. That's where the wind's getting in. I crouch, knees protesting, and press my fingers to the edge. The wood gives a little, flexing against old nails. The air whipping through stings my skin.
If I wedge something here… yeah. Might not be perfect, but it would keep the worst of the gusts from knifing straight through. The brick's the right shape to jam between warped boards and the frame, but the leverage angle'll take more strength than I've got left tonight.
Later. When I can feel my hands.
For now, I drag the brick closer, tucking it into the corner where wall meets door, so I can reach it without crawling out of whatever half-sleep I manage. Claiming it, a little.
The dumpster's on rusted wheels. I put a shoulder against the cold metal and push. It gives with a long, complaining squeal, shifting an inch, then two. Every centimeter it moves changes the wind; the edge of the flow slides away from the recess, leaving the doorway in a quieter pocket.
I stop before it hits anything that'll echo too loud. Heart's beating too fast for that small amount of effort. Part adrenaline, part cold, part… everything else.
The skip. The map. The trash can. Gotham.
Not now.
I drag a flattened box out of the trash spill and shake off as much slush as I can. The cardboard tears in one corner but holds enough shape to lay over the worst of the wet concrete inside the recess. It's not much of a barrier, but it's better than bare stone leaching heat straight out of my bones.
Backpack comes off with a tug that makes my shoulder complain again. I set it against the inner wall, between me and the plywood. If someone tries to rip it, they'll have to get past my body first. Not ideal, but nothing's ideal.
I sit.
Immediately want to stand again, because cold climbs through the cardboard fast, and sitting feels like surrender. But standing burns more energy. Energy I don't have.
I pull my hood up as far as it'll go, tighten the drawstring until the world narrows to a tunnel of alley and falling sleet. Knees up, arms wrapped around them, backpack under my forearms, I make my shape as small as possible.
From here, I can see the alley mouth in thin slices past the dumpster. Light from the street paints a warped rectangle on the bricks. The camera's red dot sweeps back and forth, just missing this angle.
Blind spot.
Of course I landed here.
Somewhere out on the main road, a siren starts up, grows louder, then dopplers away. A second later a different noise cuts through—static and clipped words from a police radio. I can't make out all of it from this distance, just fragments bouncing off brick.
"…repeat, GCPD unit—"
The letters hit wrong. Familiar in a way that makes my stomach twist.
GCPD. Gotham City Police Department. Dark blue uniforms. Corrupt cops with good ones stuck between. Panels and splash pages and fan arguments over which run got them right.
They shouldn't echo in an alley I can smell.
"Could be anything," I mutter, breath fogging inside the hoodie. "Could be some other GCPD. Could be cosplay city. Could be a really committed prank."
Nobody answers. The wind does a low, ugly laugh past the dumpster lid.
Farther away, someone yells, "I told you, man, not with the Bat out tonight!" The voice's edge is sharp with drunk or fear. Maybe both. I can't see him. The sound bounces off buildings and dies.
Bat.
I close my eyes, just for a second.
It's too much. Gotham trash cans. Gotham transit. GCPD on the radio. Some idiot shouting about a Bat like that's just normal background noise.
I've spent years reading this city in other people's lines. Batman in the shadows, alley with pearls on the ground, all that mythology. And now I'm hunched in a cold slit between bricks, shivering in it.
Could be a dream. Could be a coma. Could be I hit my head back there in the hallway and never actually got up.
My teeth chatter. Pain shoots up my jaw. The cold under my legs is very real. The way the wind finds every gap in my clothes is real. The ache in my shoulder is real.
If it's a dream, it's too good at the small stuff.
I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, watching the fog puff against the dark. Chest tight, like someone put a hand there and won't push or pull, just hold.
"Okay," I tell the bricks. "Fine. New world, old problems."
The bricks don't argue.
The rules don't change. Don't be seen. Don't get grabbed. Don't freeze. Everything else can wait its turn.
I let my eyes trace the imperfections in the wall opposite: hairline cracks, missing mortar, a place where someone stuffed gum into a chip and it fossilized gray. The act of cataloguing calms the noise in my head a little.
Above, somewhere past the lip of the building, rotors thud. Helicopter, maybe news, maybe cops, maybe something worse. Light flickers on clouds, but it doesn't reach down here.
The alley's other sounds roll in and out. A bottle breaking two streets over. Laughter. A burst of music from a car. The police radio again, fuzzed by distance.
I slide my hand along the concrete until my fingers bump the brick I dragged over. It's solid under my skin, cold and rough. If someone comes through the alley and decides my little pocket is a good place to look, this is all I've got between me and whatever happens.
Not much. Better than nothing.
I angle it so, if I had to, I could jam it up into the plywood, brace it, maybe buy myself a second or two of not having a stranger in my face. The full wedge trick can wait until tomorrow, when my hands work properly and I'm not three minutes from losing feeling in my toes.
Tomorrow. Like that's a guarantee.
"Survive tonight," I whisper, barely moving my lips. "Freak out about the rest later."
That's it. That's the whole plan.
My body doesn't like it. Legs twitch, wanting to pace. Shoulders hunch tighter. Heart's still running a sprint in a space the size of a closet. But there's nowhere to burn the energy that isn't going to cost me more heat.
So I do the only thing left: I get small and quiet and watch.
The camera LED keeps sweeping. Red to one side, red to the other. Never quite here.
Under a trash bag, a rat rustles, nose working overtime. It pauses when I shift, then goes back to whatever life looks like when you're fur and hunger and sharp teeth.
The wind finds a new note, whining through the crack in the plywood behind my head.
I count breaths. In. Out. In. Out. Somewhere around thirty, the shivers even out into a steady, miserable vibration. After fifty, the numbness settles enough that the pain in my fingers dulls.
The word Gotham floats up in my mind again, dragging panels and movie scenes with it. I push it down into the mental drawer marked LATER and slam it shut.
If this really is that Gotham, there's a billionaire in a cave somewhere and a cape swinging over rooftops. There are gods in other cities and aliens on TV and teams forming in secret.
None of them are here.
What's here is one alley, one loose brick, one half-blocked doorway, one kid who doesn't officially exist in any database in this universe.
I press the back of my head against the warped wood, feel it creak, and let my eyes close halfway. Not sleep. Just… narrower focus. Listening for footsteps, voices, the scrape of shoes heading my way. Ready to bolt if I have to.
The last clear thing I see before the gray fuzz creeps in at the edges is the camera's red LED sweeping past again, its cheap little brain certain there's nothing to look at in this corner.
Good, I think, right before my consciousness slips under.
Stay that way.